Kevin Padian has been awarded the 2003 Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization for his contributions to the public understanding and appreciation of science.

The Sagan Prize is given annually by Wonderfest, a five-year-old organization of scientists, educators, and journalists that produces major conferences for the general public on controversies and advances in science, to a San Francisco Bay Area researcher who brings scientific discoveries and insights to the attention of the general public.

The Association for Women Geoscientists announced in a press release dated October 3, 2003, that NCSE Supporter Patricia Kelley will receive the 2003 AWG Foundation Outstanding Educator Award at the AWG breakfast to be held at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Seattle on November 3, 2003.

An op-ed piece by Alfred Gilman, who was awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize in Medicine, and signed by sixteen members of the National Academy of Science and/or the Institute of Medicine, including three other Nobel laureates, appeared in the Dallas Morning News on Sunday, September 21, 2003. All of the signatories live and work in north Texas.

A standing-room-only crowd attended the hearing on biology textbooks before the Texas Board of Education in Austin on September 10. More than 160 people signed up to speak before the board, and the testimony continued into the wee hours.

On August 26 the school board of Washakie County School District #1, in Worland, Wyoming, voted to consider changing the district's policy on teaching biology. According to an Associated Press news report the proposed change reads: "It shall be the policy ... when teaching Darwin's theory of evolution that it is only a theory and not a fact.